An insurance industry study released in March predicted the U.S. market for genetic testing will quintuple over the next decade. Life is planning more acquisitions to compete in the market, Lucier said. “There’s more coming that will ride on top of this,” he said Monday.

Navigenics, based in San Francisco, will add about 20 employees to Life, which has about 10,400 workers. Life makes the Personal Genome Machine and Ion Proton DNA sequencers. Last month, the company announced plans to open a major instrument manufacturing plant in Singapore “to address strong customer demand around the world.” It reported $3.7 billion in sales last year.

Navigenics was established in 2006 to help patients and their doctors understand the health implications of variations in their genomes, the DNA code in each cell that determines how tissues and organs are constructed, said co-founder David Agus, a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California. Life will begin by using that software to provide services for cancer doctors who want to analyze patients’ tumors for points that might be vulnerable to treatment, he said.

Navigenics does genetic testing in a laboratory approved by the U.S. Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments. Gaining the laboratory will help Life Technologies compete to develop cancer companion diagnostics, tests that can tell doctors when a specific tumor has a DNA mutation that can be targeted by a drug, said Ronnie Andrews, Life’s president of medical sciences.

“We want to expand our capability to work with pharmaceutical companies in this area,” Andrews said. “This allows us to move more rapidly.”

Life Technologies rose 0.4 percent at the close in New York to $43.15. The shares have climbed 11 percent this year.

A March study by UnitedHealth Group predicted that annual U.S. spending on human genetic testing will increase to as much as $25 billion over the next decade, from about $5 billion in 2010.